Reading Augustine: A Guide to the Confessions - By Jason Byassee (original) (raw)

Review of The Cambridge Companion to Augustine's "Confessions"

Augustinian Studies, 2021

This Cambridge Companion serves as an authoritative guide to Augustine’s Confessions—a literary classic and one of the most important theological/philosophical works of Late Antiquity. Bringing together new essays by leading scholars, the volume first examines the composition of the text, including its structure, genre, and intended audience. Subsequent essays explore a range of themes and concepts, such as God, creation, sin, grace, happiness, and interiority, among others. The final section of the Companion deals with its historical relevance. It provides sample essays on the reception history of the Confessions. These essays demonstrate how each generation reads the Confessions in light of current questions and circumstances, and how the text continues to remain relevant and raise new questions.

Essay on Augustine's Confessions

Augustine's Confessions is a passionate and intensely intimate baring of his soul as he shares his struggles with sin and exults in his grace-filled relationship with God. It is not a carefully crafted narrative presenting Augustine in the best light but rather in the rawness of his struggles, and the reader feels as though she is intruding into his private conversation with God. He opens a window into the worldview of that time when secular ambition to be a great orator and teacher was greatly prized and the religious arena was one of debate about concepts which competed with, and incorporated, the ideas of the Greek philosophers. Life for the individual held the same delights and temptations that we encounter today, although in different guises. As he shares his road to Christianity with us, Augustine discusses various issues which become themes of his work. This essay explores his complex thinking on women and sexuality, which create inner conflict and tension between his desire for the physical while wanting to attain to the spiritual, as they control him and obstruct his path to spiritual union with God.

Syllabus Augustine's Confessions Winter 2018.doc

Aim: Our aim is to understand the structure, argument, and purpose of Augustine’s Confessions. Essential to this is uncovering the dialogue with philosophy, especially that with the Stoics, Skeptics and Platonists, embedded in the text, seeing how fundamental philosophical-theological forms, especially the Trinity, are present and determinative throughout, how Scripture is the assumed medium of knowledge and love and address to God, and how its interpretation is a crucial goal of the work. At present I am particularly interested in the role the two kinds of matter and body play in Augustine’s cosmos as exhibited in the Confessions, in how the self changes in the course of the work, and in the interplay between these selves with their perspectives and their objects which is constant in the book and that by which the work moves.

Augustine and Autobiography: Confessions as a Roadmap for Self-Reflection (2015)

Religions, 2015

In this article, I explore a pedagogical strategy for teaching Augustine’s Confessions to undergraduate students, which involves a final essay assignment. In the assignment, students compose their own “confessions” at the end of the term that employs Augustine’s Confessions as a roadmap for rigorous self-reflection. Like Augustine, they must employ a creative literary frame, without duplicating his rhetorical technique of framing his autobiography as a prayer to God. Moreover, they must reflect on the salient questions, key people, pivotal moments that have shaped them, and analyze their shifts in worldviews. The assignment aims to demystify Augustine and to reinforce the evolving nature of the self as it moves through time and absorbs new ideas and experiences, as well as helping students begin to formulate a coherent and constructive life narrative.

Augustine’s Confessions as the Autobiography

The Confessions of St. Augustine still raises doubts about its genre classification. Some scholars, ignoring the last three books, consider the whole text as an autobiography with an additional philosophical appendix. Others, on the contrary, take this work for a philosophical treatise with an unexpectedly expanded autobiographical introduction. And, there are also scholars who think that the Confessions represent an autonomous genre called “confessions” or “confessional literature”. This article has not any ambition to solve this long-standing issue, its aim is only to show that there is not necessary to challenge the genre classification of the Confessions as an autobiography because of its use of facts from author’s life in a specific way and because of many philosophical reflections included in it. Augustine uses autobiographical passages and philosophical reflections in the Confessions to construct his inner Self, and by trying to understand himself he also tries to understand God. The reconstruction of Augustine’s own personality thus represents a new way of understanding God and the redemptive effect of divine grace in human life. Autobiography and theology in the Confessions therefore go hand by hand and to separate one from the other comes at the cost of misinterpretation of this work as a whole.

Teaching Augustine’s Confessions in the Context of Mercer’s Great Books Program

Religions, 2015

Confessions in the third semester of a seven-semester sequence. Their previous reading of Greek and Roman epics and philosophical treatises as well as Biblical material equips them with a solid foundation for reading and discussing Augustine. This essay reflects on that preparation and models ways that instructors can use opening discussion questions related to those earlier readings to guide students into substantive reflection on the Confessions.